What are good examples of security awareness training?

There are many ways to conduct security awareness training in your organisation. Ensuring that your training programme is run in the right way, and that it contains the right material, is essential to keeping end users engaged with their training and ensuring that they walk away remembering and putting into action the things they have learnt.

In this article, we'll look at some examples of security awareness training content and programmes to help you build the best training programme for your company. 

The examples in this article include:

 

Example #1 - Video-based security awareness training

Videos are a great medium for teaching, as end users are likely to stay more engaged with them than lecture- or slide-show- based content. This is especially true if the videos are designed to be enjoyable to watch in addition to being informative.

At usecure, we build our own animated security awareness training videos in-house, and design them to be relatable to everyday situations that end users may find themselves in. The videos feature a relatable cast of characters and are accompanied by a humorous voiceover. We've found that by making training content enjoyable, end users have actually started looking forward to their next training session, and are far more likely to remember best practises because of the humorous and relatable situations featured in the videos.

 

 

Example #2 - Interactive security awareness training

Interactive content is another great medium of security awareness training. If training consists solely of text, end users are likely to browse through without reading, or remembering, the training they've been provided. Interactive content makes users have to engage with their training directly to proceed, which ensures that they can't skip past any material.

This interactive training slide asks end users to identify suspicious parts of a phishing email. By seeing a real-life phishing email, and having the chance to think independently and identify risk factors, users are more likely to walk away having actually built knowledge that they can use in their day-to-day work life.

real life phishing email used in simulation to help end users identify suspicious items

 

Example #3 - Security awareness training using phishing simulations

Phishing simulations allow you to take interactivity a step further - by training end users to identify risks in their actual day-to-day work life. Phishing simulations should always be accompanied with normal text or video-based training courses that teach users about the signs and tells of phishing emails, but simulations will help end users understand just how easy it is to fall for a real-life phishing email.

Holiday Phishing Email

 

What is the best type of security awareness training?

A good example of a security awareness programme is one that makes best use out of all types of training content. Combining video and interactive content with phishing simulations provides the highest chance of keeping end users engaged, while also showing them just how vulnerable they can be to cyber threats in their everyday work life.

A great security awareness training programme will also split all training material into small modules that won't overwhelm users with too much knowledge at one time. In addition, training should be spread out across the year rather than held in one session, as this will help ensure that security stays at the top of end users' minds across the year, and makes it easier for users to digest the information they are taught.

 

Get started with your one-stop security awareness training programme

The best security awareness training programme combines engaging video content, interactive exercises and automated phishing simulations. With usecure, you can enable a best-in-class training programme covering all major categories for your end users in just a few clicks.

The usecure platform is your one-stop shop for addressing human error in your organisation. The automated training programme automatically finds the weak points of your end users and builds a personalised programme for each end user to address their weak points first. With Auto Phish, you can launch automated, realistic phishing simulations in a matter of minutes.

Learn more about launching effective phishing and security awareness training with usecure's free 2021 guide below, or try usecure's security awareness training courses with a free 14-day trial.

The usecure Guide to Security Awareness Training 2021